Flyer for Bootie, the first bootleg mashup club in the United States, launched in San Francisco in 2003.

A mashup (also mesh, mash up, mash-up, blend, bootleg[1] and bastard pop/rock) is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another.[2] To the extent that such works are "transformative" of original content, they may find protection from copyright claims under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law.[3]

Bootlegs (mostly in Europe, not to be confused with unofficial remixes)

Boots (but not "booty" which is a branch of electro)

Mash-ups

Mashed hits

Smashups (or smash-ups)

Bastard pop (as in the combined songs are unofficial; this term is rarely used anymore)

Blends

Cutups (or cut ups, a term originally coined by William S. Burroughs to describe some of his literary experiments that involved literally "cutting up" different texts and rearranging the pieces to create a new piece.)

Powermixing (usually the pace has to be speeded up to allow for more song to be played and thus cannot play any single blend for the full length of the song)

Crossovers, but it is in a form of mashup, or version vs. version.

In addition, more traditional terms such as "edits" or (unauthorized) "remixes" are favored by many "bootleggers" (also known as 'leggers).[citation needed]

The practice of assembling new songs from purloined elements of other tracks stretches back to the beginnings of recorded music. If one extends the definition beyond the realm of pop, precursors can be found in musique concrète, as well as the classical practice of (re-)arranging traditional folk material and the jazz tradition of reinterpreting standards. In addition, many elements of mashup culture have antecedents in hip hop and the DIY ethic of punk as well as overlap with the free culture movement.

In 1956, Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman released what they called a "break-in" song, (i.e. material from one song would "break-in" to another) called "The Flying Saucer". The track, a reinterpretation of Orson Welles' celebrated War of the Worlds mock-emergency broadcast interspliced with musical snippets comically dramatizing the portentous patter of the announcer, spawned a raft of imitations. Goodman had several other similar hits in the 1960s and 1970s.

There have been a number of novelty records and one-off hits that have included uncleared samples. The song "Your Woman" by White Town features an uncredited sample from a 1932 song "My Woman" by the Lew Stone Band taken from the soundtrack of the Dennis Potter series Pennies From Heaven. Other notable one-off bootlegs include DNA's dance remix of Suzanne Vega's "Tom's Diner" (1990) and "You Got The Love" by The Source featuring Candi Staton (1991). Vega received quite a few unsolicited mixes of her (a cappella) song, and eventually issued an entire CD of "Tom's Diner" mixes, one notable example being "Jeannie's Diner", in which a resung verse based on Vega's composition describes the premise of the situation comedy "I Dream of Jeannie". "Tom's Diner" is likely to be the first song that was "mash mixed" as we now know the process.

One series was John Morales' (later one half of M and M productions) "Deadly Medleys", in which he mixed-up disco hits of the moment to form beat-consistent collages. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Dutch producer Jaap Eggermont produced the Stars on 45 series of records. These records attempted to cram as many hits as possible into the space of a three and a half-minute pop song, and are more accurately described as medleys. A similar series by Mirage in the late 1980s took this further by densely layering the sings on its "Jack Mix" records so that these were very close to later mashups.

Singer-producer Jonathan King anticipated the mashup genre with several novelty singles. In 1987, King accused the Pet Shop Boys of plagiarizing the melody of Cat Stevens' "Wild World" for their song "It's A Sin". To prove the point, King recorded a version of "Wild World" with an arrangement virtually identical to that of "It's A Sin". King performed an analogous stunt with a version of "He's So Fine" by The Chiffons arranged in the style of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord", making a cheeky reference to the plagiarism suit over the similarities between the two songs.

Little Roger and the Goosebumps released their single "Gilligan's Island (Stairway)", later renamed "Stairway to Gilligan's Island" in May 1978 on their own Splash Records label. The song combines the lyrics to the theme song of the television show Gilligan's Island with the music of "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin. Later in 1978, Damaskas and Barnes & Barnes were inspired by Little Roger and the Goosebumps to record "A Day in the Life of Green Acres," a song that combined the music of The Beatles "A Day in the Life" with the lyrics to the theme song of the television show Green Acres.

In the 1970s, Frank Zappa developed a technique he called "xenochrony" in which a guitar solo was extracted from its original context and placed into a completely different song. His recording engineer referred to this as "the Ampex guitar". In his rock opera Joe's Garage (1979), for example, Zappa's xenochrony can be heard on every track apart from Packard Goose.

"Rubber Shirt" from the album Sheik Yerbouti consists of a bass track and a drum track taken from two different live performances melded together in the studio.

John Oswald has been devising illegitimate compositions since the late 1960s. His 1975 track "Power" married frenetic Led Zeppelin guitars to the impassioned exhortations of a Southern American evangelist at the same time that hip hop was discovering the potency of the same (and related) kinds of ingredients. Similarly, his 1990 track "Vane", which pitted two different versions of the song "You're So Vain" (the Carly Simon original and a cover by Faster Pussycat) against each other, was a blueprint for the contemporary mashup subgenre, glitch pop. Oswald coined the term "plunderphonics" to describe his illegitimate craft. In 1993, he released Plexure. Arguably his most ambitious composition to date, it attempted to microsample the history of CD music up to that point (1982–1992) in a 20-minute collage of bewildering complexity. The ambition of this piece would later be recalled by the British bootlegger Osymyso, whose "Intro-Inspection" captured the pop-junkie feel of Plexure. Osymyso, who at the time was unaware of Oswald's work, used the same structure of an accelerando (arranging his source material in order from the slowest tempo to the fastest) to link a few bars each of 100 songs, creating a simpler sound than the thousands of overlapping and morphing pop "electroquotations" in Plexure.

In 1982, Italo disco composer and producer Stefano Pulga, under the name Pink Project, had a substantial hit with "Disco Project", a completely re-recorded version of The Alan Parsons Project's instrumental track "Mammagamma" (from the album Eye in the Sky), using "Sirius" (from the same album) as an intro, and featuring the schoolchildren's choir vocals (also entirely re-recorded by female session vocalists) from Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" on top of the Parsons track. Technically more similar to a medley of cover versions (as it did not include any elements directly taken from the original records) than to a mashup, the record was nevertheless identified with the nascent genre by Italian radio DJs.

Though Negativland are seldom acknowledged as musical antecedents of mashups, lacking perhaps the sense of fun many contemporary practitioners seek in their craft, their struggle against various forms of "censorship" (in their terms) and legal coercion (for instance, their single "U2" was one of the first pieces of music to be withdrawn for its use of unauthorised samples) has made them poster children for some mashup commentators who approach the issue from a more critical perspective, and with an eye to the complicated cultural issues raised by both accidental and deliberate plundering within music and culture generally.

In the wake of these somewhat academic explorations, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, entered the arena in 1987 with an album of plunderphony which, while still serving as a critical reflection on the nature of pop music and the power and potential of the sampler, upped the ante by being (almost) music one could dance to as well as think about. Their debut album, released under the name The JAMs, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?), was banned (thanks to its raft of uncleared samples, most notably the bulk of ABBA's "Dancing Queen"). The JAMs morphed into The KLF in 1988 and continued to pursue the same art-prankster agenda, most notably with their number 1 hit (under the name The Timelords), "Doctorin' the Tardis".

Working under the name Steinski, New York copywriter, DJ Steve Stein began (in conjunction with engineer and fellow studio boffin Doug "Double Dee" DiFranco) the next chapter in the evolution of illicit pop by producing a trio of underground 12" singles (entitled "The Payoff Mix" (1983), "Lesson 2 (The James Brown Mix)" (1984) and "Lesson 3 (History of Hiphop)" (1985)) which exerted a powerful influence on an entire generation of "samplists".

In 1994, the experimental band Evolution Control Committee released the first modern mashup tracks on their hand-made cassette album, Gunderphonic. These "Whipped Cream Mixes" combined a pair of Public Enemy a cappellas with instrumentals by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. First released on home-made cassettes in the early 1990s, likely in 1991 or 1992, it was later pressed on 7" vinyl, and distributed by Eerie Materials in the mid-1990s, the tracks gained some degree of notoriety on college radio stations in the United States.[5]

The name Pop Will Eat Itself was taken from an NME feature on the band Jamie Wednesday, written by David Quantick, which proposed the theory that because popular music simply recycles good ideas continuously, the perfect pop song could be written by [combining] the best of those ideas into one track. Hence, Pop Will Eat Itself.[6]

As a result of this, industry standard tools such as the digital audio workstationCubase and the sound editors Wavelab, Soundforge and Cool Edit Pro quickly became ubiquitous. Moreover, new tools such as Ableton Live and Sonic Foundry's (now Sony's) ACID Pro were tweaked to accommodate the needs of this new "scene". Most notably, such features as beat-mapping (a technique which simplifies the synchronization of samples of different tempos) and online previewing (allowing the composer to audition a sample, playing at the right pitch and tempo, alongside their existing composition) made it easy for many people with musical ability but little professional studio experience to knock together new combinations in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional tools, such as the magnetic tape John Oswald (and even Coldcut) slaved over in their early days.

Mark Vidler, known as Go Home Productions, summarized it by saying the benefits of such technology of AcidPro: "You don't need a distributor, because your distribution is the internet. You don't need a record label, because it's your bedroom, and you don't need a recording studio, because that's your computer. You do it all yourself.

Around 2001–2002, the blog Boomselection[8] was launched. It publicised various challenges which resulted in hundreds, if not thousands, of new bootlegs being uploaded to sites around the world. While the scene began as a primarily British phenomenon, the U.S., France and Germany are currently the hotbeds of the modern mashup movement. However, there are notable bootleggers to be found in practically every corner of the globe – wherever an Internet connection and a record collection can be found – including Australia, Belgium, Switzerland, and Sweden.

The Get Your Bootleg on site[9] (affectionately abbreviated to GYBO) became an important launchpad for new mashup tunes, and was the home of a lively community of bootleggers who offered critiques of new songs, tips for newbies, pointers on where to find a cappellas, legal advice, publicity for mashup events and general discussion of issues surrounding the mashup phenomenon.

In early 2005, Boomselection retired itself after a long period of inactivity. The year also marked a series of cease-and-desist orders brought against a number of bootleg sites, and in early 2006 GYBO received its first such notice. To survive, the site prohibited the posting of direct links to copyrighted material within the forums, but allowed users to post links to their own sites containing such material, the defence being that now GYBO was no more in violation of copyright law than Google. For the most part, the community has rallied around the site, and continues to support it in its new form.

The void left by Boomselection's demise was rapidly replaced by Mashuptown[10] which was started in early 2005 and is currently the biggest blog source of mashups on the Internet. The site has recently become the official supplier of mashups to Adam Curry's Daily Source Codepodcast.

Also in 2005, Bootie, the biggest bootleg mashup party in the world, began its monthly Bootie Top 10[11] where it posts for free download its ten best mashups, as selected by Bootie creators and DJs A Plus D. Launched in San Francisco in 2003, Bootie was the first club night in the United States dedicated solely to the burgeoning art form of the bootleg mashup, and now hosts monthly parties in several cities around the globe, including Los Angeles, Paris, Boston, Munich, and New York City. The party's slogan, "Music for the A.D.D. Generation" also inspired the creation of "A.D.D", Israel's first mash-up dedicated party.[12]

Legal mashups are hard to find, but in some relatively small music markets, legal mashups have been released. Some say that this is because publishers have understood the potential of clearing the rights of major international artist to be combined with local repertoires, to create a wider consumption for both artists on a given track.

In Israel, for example, a group called Bonna Music remixed the Depeche Mode song "Enjoy the Silence" with Balagan's "Sheket" (Hebrew: שקט‎; "Silence"). The mashup was approved by Martin Gore and released officially a month before Depeche Mode's new album Playing the Angel in 2005. It was a major hit locally and when Depeche Mode's first single was released they were more welcome in a market where the local repertoire is dominant.

Good Copy Bad Copy is a 2007 documentary about the current state of copyright and culture. It has a heavy focus on the mashup community, containing interviews with Girl Talk and Danger Mouse that reveal an emerging understanding of digital works and the obstacle to their authoring copyright presents.

The 2009 video game DJ Hero brought mash-ups together with gameplay elements from the Guitar Hero series using many of the same songs that are routinely cut-up in the online remixing scene. Notably, the tracks which use musical ideas from "Bitter Sweet Symphony" credit the sample source Andrew Oldham Orchestra rather than The Verve, even though the Verve's use of the sample and the surrounding legal controversy is what popularized the frequent use of the sample in mash-ups.

RIP!: A Remix Manifesto is an open source documentary created by Brett Gaylor and Greg Gillis (Girl Talk). The film consists of a remix of clips submitted by numerous contributors to the Open Source Cinema project. It focuses in particular on the legal "grey area" of remixing existing copyrighted works.

Lists the rights of copyright holders in the United States, including several copyright provision amendments. It became a law in October 1976 and was implemented in January 1978.

Mashup artists are permitted to remake an original song as long as the new song is substantially similar to the original song. In turn, the mashup artist must pay the original artist $0.94 for every copy of the song they sell for a profit.

Asking permission to use the song is not required, as long as payment is made.

The original manifestation of mashups in the 2000s was putting an a cappella against a completely different backing track, in order to make a "third song". Following "A Stroke of Genie-us" in 2001, the genre has continued to focus on this basic premise.

In addition, Go Home Productions, Party Ben and DJ BC, amongst many others, have produced a number of critically acclaimed songs in this vein, and in some instances have secured record deals on the back of these exercises, which arguably serve as "demo MP3s" of their musical and production skills.

Another example of a legitimate release on the back of an unofficial one can been seen in Illicit's Sneaky Armada,[13] which combined Groove Armada's I See You Baby with Teddy Pendergrass's You Can't Hide From Yourself. This was subsequently re-played, re-vocalised and re-released on Azuli's Yola label as Cheeky Armada[14] in September 2001 when it reached number 72 in the UK Singles Chart.[15] Illicit also released numerous other unofficial "versus" songs during the same period.[16]

However, not all mash-ups are as simple as A vs B. In some cases, DJs will mash 3, 4, 5, and even 6 songs to form one complete track. Mixing more than two tracks together can be a daunting task, and it requires a great deal of skill. Notably, DJ Earworm has combined the top billboard 25 into a single mashup for 2007–2012.

Girl Talk is known for his style of multi-track mashing; most of his mashups contain samples from 20–30 different tracks. Girl Talk is famous for his style of "cutting" through different songs and often building to the climax of a song, upon which the song settles into a groove before cutting away again.

Mixing two or more versions of a song to create a duet or alternative version of a song is what a version vs version is set to accomplish. It can mix two different versions of a song, such as a ballad and original version, or a cover version of the song. Some of the more popular version to version mixes are language mixes, which is mixing multiple languages into one song. A slightly less popular style of this is mashing two different remixes or the original and a specific remix of a song together. Version vs Version mashups usually have the same original instrumental but sometimes it is changed to benefit the song.

Music collages which refer to avant-garde music practice and Musique Concrète. These are not intended for the dance floor and are made using all types of music and sound as valid sound sources to be played simultaneously and often manipulated. Beat matching and stylistic or aesthetic similarities are not an important factor in these mash ups. Chaos, dissonance and harmony are all possible results.

A current (2013) example of Abstract Mash Ups can be heard on radio shows by Joel Cahen (aka 'Spax') on Resonance fm in London. The series of shows which began in 2005, feature live abstract mash ups using MP3s, turntables, CDs, DVDs and field recordings as simultaneously played sound sources. The third season of this series, Soundsoup, March 2008–April 2010, veered the style towards a more narrative based one.

Glitch pop is a subgenre of the mashup scene which marries the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) wizardry associated with Kid 606 and Tigerbeat6 records to the ostensibly familiar contours of pop. Sometimes this is done in a spirit of "homage"; sometimes it serves merely as a form of ridicule and even vilification; often it is both at the same time.

An example of the "double science" at play in glitch pop is Skkatter's "Dirty Pop", which takes a song that is already an epic of carefully constructed digital micro-malfunctions (BT's deconstruction of *NSYNC's "Pop") and pushes it even further out to the margins of musical mayhem. Similarly, Australian bootlegger and glitch pop co-conspirator Dsico (real name Luke Collinson) has reworked a number of R&B tunes by such artists as The Neptunes and (again) *NSYNC in a spirit that is at once both satirical and steeped in fanboydom. In most cases these remixes render ostensibly mainstream songs "avant garde" and fresh, sometimes by working against the spirit of the original, but often by leveraging the sugar rush at the heart of much of the best contemporary pop, and adding sonic CGI to its emotional armoury.

In the UK, the most notable exponent of the genre is Poj Masta, a teenage schoolboy whose work has been keenly supported by DJs such as Eddy Temple-Morris and James Hyman of London's Xfm radio station. Their weekly show, "The Remix", has played a major role in nurturing new bootleggers and bringing them to the attention of a wide audience.[17]

SiX DwArF is a non-commercial mashup artist from Scotland in the UK with a twist. He creates cross-genre mashup tunes but also invents mashup promo videos to go with them which feature on Mash TV, hosted on Veetle and on various video hosting sites. SiX DwArF also creates homemade promos to champion songs that do not already have one in which he feels deserves it, receiving praise from various artists. His modus operandi is: "There's no campaigns, zero commercial gain, no vested interests. Nothing is sacred. Don't do genre... it's stereotype by another name."[citation needed]

Technically, all mashups are remixes. But while most are made up entirely of plundered material, some bootleggers have fused old a cappella tracks with completely new compositions of their own device. An example of popular remix artists that primarily remixes single songs but also mashes songs are The White Pandas. The Chicago-based duo has emerged as one of the biggest upcoming DJs.

Another popular example with fans of Japanese pop is Evil Morning, an album which combines vocal tracks from Morning Musume and their associated artists with new instrumental tracks that rearrange or replay the original music in the style of hard rock or heavy metal.

DJ Danger Mouse's critically acclaimed remix project The Grey Album effectively launched a new pop subgenre. While The Beatles had made appearances on several mash-up tracks prior to this album (for instance PPM's "A Life in the Day" and JPL's "Let It Be Missy Elliott (Beatlesmix)"), The Grey Album distinguished itself by being made up entirely of samples from The Beatles' White Album and vocals from Jay-Z's The Black Album. The project received considerable attention following EMI's legal threats towards distributors of the album.

Another album is Jon Moskowitz Presents Blue Eyes Meets Bed-Stuy, produced by DJ Cappel & Smitty (2005). This is a remix/mash-up album of The Notorious B.I.G. and Frank Sinatra. The project was very well received, with major online and print coverage. It was conceived and executive produced by Jon Moskowitz. DJ Cappel and Smitty took The Notorious B.I.G.'s a cappellas and remixed them with notable Frank Sinatra songs, by contributing Sinatra's solos, hooks and choruses.[citation needed]

The Best of Bootie mashup compilation series is compiled and produced each year by A Plus D, creators of the international mashup club Bootie. The compilations have been released in December every year since 2005, and are annual Internet sensations, with each album garnering over 5000GB+ of downloads.[18]

While there is some overlap between the terms "cut up" and "mash up", the former has increasingly come to refer to pieces that rely on the humour (or pathos) of reconstructed spoken word and video material. This may be due to the fact that the term "cut up" was used decades earlier by novelist and artist William S. Burroughs to refer to his literary cutups as well as his tape recorder experiments, which featured spliced vocal tracks in the same way that his written cut-ups literally cut up and rearranged various texts.

One of the most well known artists in the mashup industry is Gregg Michael Gillis, otherwise known as Girl Talk. He studied engineering in college and then quit the industry in 2007 in order to focus solely on his music career. He is originally from Pittsburgh, PA and is one of many artists under the record label, Illegal Art, which specializes in music sampling. Other artists with Illegal Art include Junk Culture and People Like Us. Girl Talk has released five albums with Illegal Art: Secret Diary, Unstoppable, Night Ripper, Feed the Animals, and All Day. Girl Talk does not believe that they are violating any factor of the Fair Use Laws as the law does not specify for mashups and remixes and the length of the song that is used. Thus, Girl Talk feels that they should not have to pay the sustained artists a fee for the work they are using. However, others feel that Girl Talk is violating the Fair Use Law and should be penalized.

With the rise of electronic dance music in the mainstream media, Italian duo Djs from Mars became a notable act in mash-up making. Most well known for mixing opposite genres, on a 128BPM club beat, the duo has toured the world extensively and their mashups have been played by DJs such as David Guetta, Bob Sinclar, Martin Solveig, among others. Wearing box-masks over their heads, the satirical duo has been mixing Lady Gaga with Metallica, Skrillex with Oasis and over 30 different songs into one with their "Megashuffle MultiBootleg". Djs from Mars' success was confirmed in March 2011, when the pair opened a show for Tiesto, in Atlantic City.

Jordan Roseman (aka DJ Earworm) gained popularity when he came out with his mashup "United States of Pop" in 2007. The mashup contains the top 25 songs of the year according to the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles of 2007. He has since released one at the end of each year. Earworm has also released mashups he has done for Capital FM's Summertime Ball since 2010. In addition, Earworm was asked to create multiple mixes for the 2012 Summer Olympics to be played at various venues throughout London.

Bob Cronin (aka dj BC) has been heard on radio stations from New York to Paris. He is known for founding both Mash Ave and Bootie Boston. dj BC is associated with the fictional band The Beastles which BC created in 2004. The band is a combination of music from The Beatles and the Beastie Boys. BC's band has released three albums, dj BC presents The Beastles, Let It Beast, and Ill Submarine. Other notable works from BC are Glassbreaks, in which the music of Philip Glass is combined with artists such as Lil' John and Kanye West, and Wu Orleans, a mashup of Wu-Tang Clan and the local music found in New Orleans, Louisiana for the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

Max Tannone is a New York based producer who has released multiple mashup albums. He is most well known for his first album entitled Jaydiohead released in 2009. The album combined the music of Jay-Z and Radiohead. Tannone has since released seven more albums, Doublecheck Your Head, Mos Dub, Dub Kweli, Selene, Ghostfunk, Mic Check 1234!, and Champagne Jerry - For Real, You Guys.

The Legion of Doom is an electronic production team consisting of Chad Blinman and Trever Keith. The group is most known for their album Incorporated which featured a variety of A vs B style mashups. The album was originally leaked online due to multiple artists not wanting their music being used in mashups.[20][21] The album has since been released through Illegal Art.

French DJ and producer Hugo Pierre Leclercq (aka Madeon) received acclaim when his YouTube video "Pop Culture", in which Leclercq performs a live mashup, went viral. He has since released three more mashups along with multiple remixes, singles, and production and songwriting credits. In addition, he has released two EPs, The City and Japan Only EP.

American comedian, actor, puppeteer, etc. Neil Cicierega made two albums after he got certain songs from Rock Band (video game), which were named Mouth Sounds and Mouth Silence. The album was to make Neil laugh, but also to offend fans or artists of the songs used. Some of the songs that were used were Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, Imagine by John Lennon, Wonderwall by Oasis, Float On by Modest Mouse, Chop Suey by System of a Down, and, most notably, All Star by Smash Mouth.